The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
Some network devices, such as network switches, routers, edge devices and the like employ store and forward architectures in which received packets are stored in memory for subsequent transmission to desired destinations after processing. Some such network devices utilize multiple memory devices and/or multiple memory banks so that multiple packets, such as packets received via different ports of a network device, can be simultaneously written to respective ones of the memory device or memory banks. In a network device that utilizes multiple memory devices and/or multiple memory banks, an arbiter device may be used to arbitrate access to the multiple memory devices and/or multiple memory banks. Speed of the arbiter device affects how quickly arbitration decisions are made and accordingly, how quickly packets can be written to the memory.